


Control

by theclockiscomplete



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Kink Meme, Light Bondage, Sickfic, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-27
Updated: 2015-04-27
Packaged: 2018-03-25 23:51:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3829516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclockiscomplete/pseuds/theclockiscomplete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clara's immune system is reset and she and the Doctor must deal with the resulting plethora of illnesses that result all at once, including one that can't be immediately seen. Lots of gratuitous fluff, some plot, and more smut than I think I have the capacity to ever write again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Control

**Author's Note:**

> I did it. I wrote porn. It was fun because I'm a kinky asexual who would never want to see any of this on-screen. I heard a word for that feeling once. Anyway, I've not been doing so well mentally lately, so this was cathartic in a lot of ways. Also, it was written for a friend, who doubles as one of two inspiration sources for this writing style. Kind of an all-in-one deal here, yeah? Enjoy.

“This is a really unfortunate time for the doors to be frozen shut, Doctor.” Clara’s teeth clicked together violently and she took a moment to wiggle her arms out of her jacket sleeves and wrap them around her middle underneath. She reckoned the action probably would have had a better effect if she wasn’t soaked through all three layers. In a rare display of frustration, the Doctor kicked the edge of the TARDIS and muttered something that Clara was willing to guess was not a platitude about the weather. Well okay. Given the ferocity of the snow whipping around them, it could have been that too.

“We need to get you to shelter,” he said, and he had to raise his voice to be heard over the wind and ice, squinting against a combination of not-dark and the white flying into their faces to see her.

“Good plan,” Clara managed, jumping up and down and trying not to focus on the fact that she’d lost feeling in her feet several minutes ago, practically the moment they’d touched the water. The Doctor scanned the snowscape with a hand shielding his eyes, then abruptly withdrew his sonic screwdriver and pointed it at the nearest drift, which was nearly as twice as tall as him. She saw the tip light up but she couldn’t hear the noise as slowly, a large hole opened up at the base. He kept the sonic trained on the widening gap until it was tall enough for him to stoop and enter. A few moments later, he reappeared at the entrance and tugged her by an empty coat sleeve inside with him. “Wow,” she said, straightening up. “It’s bigger on the inside.” It might not have been true, she realized as the Doctor ran the sonic across the top of the entrance twice: once to melt the snow into a sheet of water that plummeted towards the ground, and once to freeze it solidly in place, but the drift had obviously been bigger than she’d been able to discern from outside. Immediately after the Doctor froze the makeshift door, silence weighed down and Clara could hear her teeth chattering. Obviously the Doctor could too, because he turned to her and began unzipping her sodden, frozen coat.

“Doesn’t your screwdriver melt snow?” she asked after his third attempt at fumbling with the stuck zipper.

“It didn’t melt the snow, Clara, it merely suggested to the solid particles of water that perhaps they should consider being a bit more flexible. Huge difference, really.”

“Mmm,” she said. “And the particles in my zipper are immune?” He glanced at her, his eyebrows drawn in a fierce scowl, and she wondered how she ever thought that that particular facial expression could have been anything but deep concern. With Danny she’d never had to guess. Shit. She shut her eyes against the litany— _youkilledhimyoukilledhimyoukilledhim_ — that invaded her mind whenever she thought of him, thought about how it’d been she who condemned him, distracted him… she opened her eyes and forced a smile at the Doctor. Without comment, eyes still on hers, he jerked once more at the zipper and the front of her coat creaked open at last.

“Really, Clara,” he said, returning his gaze to her jacket, “I will never understand why you felt the need to take a dip on one of the galaxy’s coldest planets. But I have to say, I admire your courage.”

“Shut up.” Clara’s voice fell flat on the dense air and the Doctor finally managed to wrench her coat open with several concerning cracking noises coming from the fabric. “You were the one who said the ice was thick enough to lie on,” she added.

“Stop talking,” the Doctor said. “Save your strength. Can you walk to the bench?” Clara peeked around his arm and squinted against the dim light to see that yes, when he’d hollowed out the ice cave, he’d fashioned a ridge of packed ice along one of the walls.

“Course I can,” she said. “I walked all the way—“ her words ended in a squeak as she tried to take a step and was thwarted by a combination of stiff snow pants and lack of feeling in her feet. The Doctor threw out an arm to catch her and maneuvered her so that he was holding her in a kind of fireman’s carry, then set her down gently on the bench and began tugging at her jumper, which was mostly unfrozen thanks to the little bit of body heat maintained by her coat. In his haste to rid her of the icy garment, his thumb brushed roughly across her nipple, making her jump. She met his eyes and aimed for a smile. “I call top.” She was trying for humor, but her voice came out closer to something hysterical and sleep-softened as the Doctor worked the sodden material over her head. He paused and sighed, and then allowed his eyes to meet hers.

“Always,” he said, “and it’s a great idea for staying warm, but first I’ve got to get you out of your wet clothes. All of them.”

“I—” Clara’s breath caught in her chest and she coughed sharply. “I know what hypothermia looks like, Doctor,” she croaked. “And besides, no complaints here.” His eyes lingered on hers a moment longer, and then he nodded once, almost smiling, and got to work on her stiffening trousers.

She thought for some reason she’d be colder once all of her clothes were finally removed, but she felt nothing except the sensation of her teeth clicking together as the Doctor shrugged out of his red-lined coat and spread it on the snow-dusted ground. He yanked off his zip-up jumper and bundled Clara up in it. She sucked in a sharp breath as, a moment later, her skin began to prickle with painful stirrings that she knew would turn into warmth. She yawned, and he was there suddenly, lifting her and laying her down on the spread-out coat. He sat down and shifted until he had Clara flush against him, her stuttering breath on his collarbone and his arms around her shaking body. “If you weren’t so terrible about taking the first step, I’d suspect you set this up,” she teased. He shifted and she felt the hardening line in his trousers against her stomach, which was currently the part of her that was warmest.

“You missed the first step about five minutes ago,” he said seriously. “But I have to watch your body temperature. Can’t afford to be distracted.”

 “So why can’t we get in the TARDIS?” she asked, her voice faintly muffled by the fabric of his jumper—the holey one that she was determined to nick if she could only figure out where he put it when he changed. It was her favorite one to see him in; her memories of him wearing it ranged from innocent banter over spilled tea to the beautiful sight of him handcuffed to the rails of the TARDIS and gasping her name, said jumper bunched above the waist.

“Power’s out,” The Doctor said, exasperation in his voice. Clara blinked back to the present. “She’s got solar-powered backup, but…”

“We used it all up last week,” Clara finished.

“I’ll have to take her to Cardiff after this. Let her rest up, get a full battery.” They lay still in silence for a long minute. Clara realized that even though it felt like hours since the ice had cracked beneath her, since the Doctor had screamed her name in blind panic as the water had stolen her breath and covered her head with the hazy, blurry colors reflected in its surface, since his desperate hand had latched onto her hood, it had probably only been forty five minutes. A sudden wave of warmth shuddered through her, and her bare legs twitched reflexively up against the Doctor’s as she sighed and burrowed closer. She coughed again, and the movement sent sparks of painful heat through her body—probably a good sign. She could almost feel her fingers again, pressed between her chest and the Doctor’s. She felt him hesitate, and then he reached down and guided her legs to tangle in between his, where it was warmer. His hand lingered on the inside of her upper thigh, and she pressed a kiss to the base of his throat, enjoying the hitch of his breathing but too cold and exhausted to pursue the action.

“I’m sorry I fell in and caused all this trouble,” she said tiredly, her eyes getting droopy in the atmosphere that could almost pass as warm.

His chest rumbled as he replied. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “I brought you here to see the lights. It’s my fault.”

 _Youkilledhimyoukilledhimyoukilledhim._ “Wow,” Clara said, nudging the shoulder closest to her forehead. “I must have been in more danger than I realized, if you’re apologizing.”

“Hah,” he said, deadpan. Clara felt fear coil in her stomach. The mantra paused.

“That was your cue to say ‘of course you’re not in danger—not anymore,’ or something like that,” she said.

“I know.” He nestled his chin into her wet—but warming—hair and took a deep breath. Clara waited, suddenly no longer certain that her shivering was entirely owed to the cold. “It’s not what you think,” he said finally. “No radiation or weird alien virus—that would actually be better since I’ve got medicine for those sorts of things—”

“Doctor.”

“Yes. Sorry. It’s a reset.” Clara wiggled so that she could look up into the Doctor’s face, confused. “Your immune system,” he explained. “The water here is healing, and the way it works is to completely purge your body of any kind of bacteria. Even…”

“Even the good kind,” Clara finished.

He nodded. “Normally, visitors come here in the summer for just that reason. They have otherwise incurable diseases, and the water very often at least buys them time if it doesn’t eradicate the illness completely.” He glanced sidelong at her. “The good news is that the sicker you are, the harder the reset. You’re in reasonably good health—”

“But now I’ve got no defense against getting sick from the cold,” Clara said. _Youkilledhimyoukilledhimyoukilledhim._

The Doctor looked pained. “Because I am an idiot,” he said. “I meant to drop us here in the absolute dead of winter, when there was no chance of the ice cracking because it would have been several meters thick. But I think I overshot by a few weeks, and I’m afraid our...”

“Snogging,” she added helpfully.

“Yes, that. It was a bit too much for the ice to handle.”

“Just think,” she said, smiling into his shoulder, “if you’d just gotten my coat off sooner, it might have been spared the dip.” She stopped whatever self-deprecating comment he was about to say with an openmouthed kiss to his lips. He jumped—less than he had for those first few weeks after Christmas, bless—before his mind caught up to his own desire and reminded him that yes, this was a thing he was very much allowed to do now, and he parted to allow her entrance. She pulled back after a moment and tapped him gently on the nose. “Could have saved a lot of trouble if we’d gotten on with things faster. What else is new, you old space owl?” She smiled when he blinked at her, rather owlishly in fact, and curled back up against him. “This isn’t so bad,” she said. “You’re just going to have to take care of me until things are back to normal.”

His long arms tightened around her, pulling her closer. “You have my word.” _Those words. They’re yours now. Youkilledhimyoukilledhimyoukilledhim…_ Clara drifted into another in a long line of fitful dozes, the words still echoing in her mind.

 

She’d expected something like a bad cold—pneumonia, perhaps, or strep throat—but this? This was ridiculous and it was scary and in moments of lucidity she was pretty sure that at some point the things coming out of her stomach were remnants of food from past lives. Her life narrowed down to sweat and snot and pain and tears and the Doctor’s cool hands on her neck, holding her hair, carrying her when she absolutely had to be moved. And always, through her chills and fevers and occasional babblings, she heard his voice soothing her, felt him draw near when her needy hands reached blindly for him, woke up from nightmares to moments of clarity in which he was nestled beside her in Clara’s TARDIS room, watching her or dabbing at her face with a cold rag. She remembered, once, the panic of drowning in open air and his face over hers—concern, fear, determination in those stormy eyes—and then something solid, plastic in her mouth and she was breathing without trying; she could rest without having to remember how to inflate and deflate her own lungs.

In short, the bad cold and the pneumonia came not as the worst of her body’s attempts to fight off everything, but as lesser maladies—signs she was finally recovering. She awoke with a gasp, and although she immediately choked on the phlegm in her chest and spent the better part of the next few minutes hacking and lightheaded, she knew, dimly, that her grasp on reality was firm this time—she’d turned some kind of corner. As always he was there, murmuring comfort and smoothing her damp hair away from her face and when she’d managed to swallow whatever liquid the Doctor had pushed towards her, she tried speaking.

“How—” it came out as a whisper and she cleared her throat and tried again. This time, there was the hint of a voice. “How long have I been out?”

A pause, during the silence of which Clara could hear the machine next to her as it kept count of her vitals, and then: “A week.”

“Nice try,” she said, almost before he finished. “How long really, Doctor? I can take it.”

He let out a breath, and Clara saw in the slump of his shoulders and the deepened lines in his face how serious things must have been. “Fifteen days,” he said and when she blinked at him, added “and seven hours.”

“And I’m willing to bet you haven’t slept for any of it.”

“A little,” he protested. “When you did.”

“Doctor, I feel like I have been run over by a truck. Superior physiology or no, you’re dead exhausted.” He rubbed at one eye quickly, like he didn’t want her to see. “Come up here and rest with me,” she said gently.

“I’ve got to check your IV and make sure you’re getting enough nutrients. And I need to turn the telepathic dampers back on, because right now there’s no barrier between my mind and yours.”

She tilted her head. “You can hear my thoughts?”

“Not this second,” he said, waggling his fingers. “Touch telepath.”

“Right. Well. If you aren’t going to nap with me—” she brought a strand of hair around to her line of sight and made a face “—not that I can blame you—then help me take a shower. Fifteen days…ugh.” She sat up slowly, the Doctor’s hands twitching towards her and pulling back in hesitation.

“It hasn’t been fifteen days,” he said. Clara quit fiddling with the IV in the back of her hand and looked up at him. “And let me do that,” he added. He wrapped a rag around his hand and held Clara’s lightly as he gently worked to draw the needle out of her skin. “I bathed you twice,” he elaborated. “When your fever got too high.”

“Oh. Well then it should be the same thing now, right? But with a little bit of extra help from my end?” The Doctor hesitated, and then shook his head.

“You were incoherent before,” he said. “Your walls were down and I was trying to alleviate some of the mental attacks. Nightmares, mainly, and…wanting to die. There was a bit of that. I was helping keep that at bay. Touching you now…it’s an experience I’m not sure this body has mastered quite yet. I guarantee you’ll be the first to know when I figure it out, but until then...”

Clara drummed her heels against the edge of the mattress for a moment. “Well,” she said. “You go turn on the damper, and I’ll wait here for help getting the shower. Deal?” She noticed his shoulders drop in relief, and also noticed him trying to hide it. Something in the Doctor’s words had triggered a kind of dread in her, like she’d forgotten something important and it was going to cost someone. She realized the Doctor was studying her and cracked a smile.

“Deal,” he said finally, eyes softening around the corners as he turned to get to the console room. He paused at the doorway. “I left you some mouthwash if you like.”

“That,” Clara said, leaning gingerly towards the stand by her bed, “is the best news I have heard all day.”

The Doctor had once boasted that the TARDIS was infinite—that she liked to pluck rooms out of moments in time that she thought he might like, and then either switch them out in place of his bedroom or light up a stripe in the floor that led to whatever new addition it was. Clara wasn’t sure she bought “infinite,” but she’d been on the TARDIS for a total of about half a year and had never used the same bathroom or shower twice—and there’d been some good ones. Clara knew they were in for something special, though, when the Doctor pushed open the door and warmth and sunlight came spilling out, causing her to squint. He carried her down a short flight of steps and set her down on an ornate chair by the water’s edge before shrugging out of his coat, and Clara took the opportunity to look around.

They seemed to be both in a building and outside of it. It seemed to Clara that the water, brilliant blue and about waist-high, was like a man-made river that wound through a kind of temple which had been designed to maximize the beauty of the rays. Everything was decorated in dark blue and white, with the sun through the glass sides casting ripples of light over the walls. The sound of water caught her attention and she turned to find the Doctor standing beside her with his hand extended. She pulled her nightie slowly up and over her head and examined herself. Being sick had taken its toll on her; she could count her ribs and her skin was a washed-out pale that came with going too long without a tan. She shuddered to think of the state of her face or the hair under her arms.

“Clara.” She’d unconsciously placed an arm over her chest, and she wouldn’t meet his eyes. He took the extra step to stand before her and tipped her chin up to look at him. “Are you okay?”

“I’m gross.” In her peripheral vision, she saw his posture relax slightly, like _oh thank goodness it was just that._ That feeling of unease returned, stronger than before, and she felt like she almost had a grip on it until the Doctor broke her train of thought.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He scooped her against him and waded through the water, following the glass-walled path to a gem-studded shower area which offered a view of the edge of a waterfall that plunged so far down that Clara couldn’t see where it ended, only the mist it created. “You’ve been unconscious or delirious for the last two weeks,” the Doctor continued. “What happened to your body is natural and it will go away as you gain strength.” He kissed her temple and set her on the lower of two ledges in the closed-off area, so that the water lapped around her thighs and she had support to lean against. She fiddled with a folded washcloth next to her before looking up to meet his eyes. The gems in the wall lit her up with small pools of fuchsia and gold, and she could see him struggling to breathe normally. Somehow, that did more for her confidence than his words could have. She coughed, noticing that the tightness in her chest had been replaced by the tickle of broken-up mucus. Unpleasant, but an improvement.

The Doctor touched a hidden panel, and fountains of warm water began to jet from all directions, startling Clara at first. It felt good, though, massaging her sensitive skin. The water around the Doctor’s waist began to flow towards a space in the rock, a kind of self-cleaning purpose that kept their little haven clear and clean. The Doctor ran a hand through his now-sodden hair and smiled at her, suddenly looking like a much younger version of himself. The silver curls on his chest were darkened by the spray and pointed a clear trail down below the waterline. He saw her looking and touched her face. “Clara…” she blinked up at him and covered the hand on her cheek with her own. He leaned down and took her lips in his, and Clara could feel the mix of relief and desperation in his touch. The kiss was long, languorous, and when they pulled apart it was because Clara’s slight frame was shaking from a mixture of oxygen deprivation and her attempts to smother another fit of coughing.

“You’re going to get yourself sick,” she admonished when she could.

“If I could, I’d already be infected.” His hand slipped behind her head and when he brought it back into view, it was with a small puddle of soap in his palm. He worked the gel into her scalp and tangled his long fingers through her hair, applying just the right pressure to her temples and the spot behind her ears that she ended up simply sagging against his chest as the jets of water washed the soap down to the surface and out over the cliff. He rubbed the washcloth in slow circles on her shoulders and along her spine, eyes softening when he felt her hum of pleasure against his chest. He knelt so that he was nearly eye level with her stomach and continued his ministrations, wiping away dried sweat and tears and the occasional fleck of blood from her skin. The tips of his fingers probed into the hollows of her body so that by the time he was finished cleaning her, she was only half-conscious and relying on the support of the wall behind her.

He stood when he had finished and lifted her against him again, taking a long moment to look into her peaceful face. There was a slow, burning joy within him to see her appearing to be pain-free for the first time in too many days, mixed with a fierce streak of protectiveness that neither of them could ever fully explore. She smiled at him, touched his face, and burrowed against him, warm and alive…Rassilon, he was hers and he always would be. By the time he curled up beside her in his bed, the two of them dry and Clara in one of his jumpers and fast asleep already, the tension and sense of duty that had propelled him for days and prevented him from rest had dulled into a pleasant pulse between his hearts.

The time after that was, frankly, marked by their showering and eating. The two of them did little else. The Doctor took the opportunity to try soup recipes from books he’d collected over all of his regenerations—“You don’t happen to adore celery, Clara? Alright then we’ll just leave these volumes here”— and after a particularly interesting encounter, had been banned from using any meats that did not come from Earth. The original Earth. Clara’s version of Earth. The original Clara’s original version of Earth. “You’re so picky” he complained, but there was no malice and she knew better than to believe him when he said the next concoction was made with fresh puppy. For the most part, Clara was happy. Weak for a long while, but getting stronger every day. But that feeling of dread—that cold knot in her stomach, waiting to be recognized—remained, and she couldn’t shake it.

She was warming cocoa on the stove when she remembered. Danny. He’d died. Six months ago, and she’d been on the TARDIS like nothing had happened, like she wasn’t responsible for distracting him…a sob rose in her throat and she fell to her knees, accidentally knocking her mug off of the cabinet. Dim pinpricks of pain shot through the heel of her hand and alongside one of her legs, but she was too far into her spiral of thoughts to register it properly. Five minutes a day, he’d said, and she couldn’t even manage that—had _forgotten_ , somehow, that she’d caused everything to begin with. She heard the Doctor, dimly, race into the kitchen area, felt his presence in her space, his hands on her, feeling for damage and gently extricating her from the shattered porcelain. He was calling her name and he sounded so dim, and then he’d crushed her to him and was kissing her desperately. She snapped back to the present and punched him solidly in the chest. He fell back, startled, as Clara cradled her hand—the force of the blow had deepened a few of the cuts from the porcelain.

“Clara!” The Doctor was surprised, not hurt, but she was willing to rectify that when she stood up, staring down in fury at her best friend, her lover, her traitor.

“You were in my head.” Her voice sounded high to her ears, disbelieving. He reached out towards her bloody hand, and she snatched it back. “You were in my head, and you made me forget him? How could you?”

“Clara, I didn’t—I only stopped the guilt. It was killing you!” He leaned forward so that they were nearly nose-to-nose, and Clara felt the fight go out of her as quickly as it had arrived, leaving her lightheaded. “It was the guilt that made you so sick,” he said quickly. “I didn’t know—I thought you were healthy. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Clara raised a trembling, red hand to her line of sight and stared at it wonderingly. With her anger receding, the pain became more pronounced and she looked the Doctor dead in the face, took in his frightened, compassionate eyes. “You should have let it,” she whispered, and then he was on his feet to catch her as she swayed towards him. This time she didn’t push him away, but clutched the fabric of his jumper and sobbed in the way that she never had after Danny’s death. For all of the crying that she’d skipped in the days after his funeral—she had never really gotten over the shock, she realized, and how had she ever thought she’d been exempt from the stages of grief?—she wept, blood and tears mingling on the dark wool before her.

“I lost control and I told him I loved him,” she managed. “And he died. Right then.” He stroked her hair and held her close, murmuring soothing words, waiting. “I lost control and begged him not to change,” she hiccupped, and a distant part of her registered that the tensing that always came when she mentioned his former self was absent. “And he did,” she finished. “My mum—she died because I was too young to do anything that might have saved her.”

There was a time she would have balked for him to see her like this, control freak Clara who was always on top, always the one deciding what the two of them got, no matter the situation. The boss. But he’d seen her at her worst—near death, begging for it even—delirious and leaking from every possible orifice, and he’d been there every step of the way. She could lose control with him, sometimes, only when she absolutely had to, and it was okay.

He was carrying her, she realized. It had been several days since that had been necessary, but she took the chance to gasp for air and work to get her emotions under control. She felt him deposit her on something soft, only to sit beside her and pull her knee up onto his for inspection. Her eyes ached, and she reached up to rub at them. She realized her mistake just as his long, cool fingers trapped her wrist, preventing her from scrubbing blood into her face. He dabbed at her lashes with a warm, damp rag, and then moved on to her wrist and hand, searching tenderly for any bits of broken mug. “Clean cuts,” he murmured. “No shards.” She adjusted so that her head rested on his collarbone, seated between his legs with her knees drawn up for his careful cleaning and probing. She twitched when he pulled a thin piece of white from the top of her knee, but there seemed to be nothing else stuck into her skin and the blood came off under his gentle washing. Het set the now-pink rag to the side, and the moment he withdrew his hand from it, Clara arched up and crashed her lips onto his.

He’d been half-expecting the assault, but it wasn’t enough to keep his balance and within seconds, they were in a familiar position—he on his back with her straddling his stomach and bracing herself with her hands on either side of his head. But this time, he was resisting, palms pressing gently on her shoulders. She pulled back, confused and prepared to snap into control mode if necessary. “Wait,” he panted. “Please.” She rocked back, and okay maybe she did rub her arse over his dick a bit more forcefully than the situation really warranted, but—her train of thought was cut off as the Doctor sat straight up, overbalancing her, and then rolled so that he was suddenly on top, his face centimeters from hers, eyes dark and fathomless on hers.

She felt a thrill—his face when he was aroused was one of her favorite sights—but she squished it down and reached for the buttons on his collar. The Doctor stilled her hand in his once more. “Clara,” he whispered, his voice strained in the way that did almost as much for her as tying him to the bedframe. He repeated her name over and over, a benediction, taking in her bright eyes, her wet lips, her breasts just visible under the top of her strapless cami, moving with every breath. He traced his fingers gently down her jawline, and hesitated before he spoke again.

“You are always the one leading,” he began, lifting a hand when she opened her mouth to protest. “You are,” he insisted. “You can’t help it. It’s natural for you, assuming authority over everyone in the room, analyzing how to best keep them safe and, if possible, yours.” He kissed the hollow of her throat, one of her favorite spots on him, and her breath hitched in something just short of a whimper. “Danny was yours,” he continued, and somehow it didn’t occur to Clara that this might be, to an outside viewer, _weird_ , that her present lover was with her, aroused and obviously planning something for her, and talking about one of her greatest failures. “He was yours, and yours willingly, as I am.” Clara frowned.

“That’s sweet and all, but I don’t really have a good track record with my belongings. That’s kind of the whole issue here.”

He rocked his hips against the inside of her leg and pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead. “I want to take the reins from you, just this once. I want to see you give up the control,” he dropped a kiss to the space between her breasts, “and understand that letting someone love you does not mean you must lose them.” Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes again and she blinked them away hastily. “Can you do that for me?” he asked, and his lips were soft in the dip above her collarbone, his thumb slow across her nipple.

“I don’t know,” she gasped. “I’m afraid.”

“That, my Clara, has never stopped you before.” He braced himself on a knee between her thighs and reached into the drawer of the nightstand to withdraw a long, soft rope. She eyed it, somehow feeling more nervous and aroused than she could ever remember. Finally, she nodded.

“Okay,” she said. “I trust you.” The Doctor smiled and lifted her palm to his mouth—a promise. He brought her other hand up next to it and slowly, reverently, began to cross the rope over and under and back again. He made a kind of loop with a deft twist of his fingers and wound the last few feet around the middle rail and top arch of the headboard. He placed a hand on her stomach and one between her shoulder blades, pressing gently to guide her onto her stomach.

Everything felt slow to Clara; she was used to being quick, efficient—unless it was him she was teasing. This was payback, she supposed. At a nudge, she gathered her knees up underneath her so that the rope from her wrists to the headboard had a little slack in it. He hooked his index fingers into the elastic under her arms and tugged gently, rolling the material down until her breasts sprang free, nipples hardening against the chill in the air. He rolled her sleep shorts and her knickers down, dragging his fingertips down her sides along the way. He kissed the curve of her arse as Clara lifted each knee to allow him to fully dispose of her clothes. She couldn’t remember ever feeling more naked than she did in that moment, and was startled when he withdrew another rope from the drawer. Apparently the TARDIS approved of this; she was positive that drawer had been the one with the mouthwash before.

“Okay?” he asked, and his breath made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

“Yes,” she squeaked. The Doctor chuckled and ran a hand down her spine, lightly enough that she shuddered and arched up against him. He passed a teasing finger along her warm, wet folds and her head dropped with a moan. He sped up a little, then, and she was wickedly pleased at the effect she was having on him even when she wasn’t free to roam her hands over his most sensitive spots. He wound the new rope around her ankle and tied it to the nearest bedpost, then crossed and quickly did the same to the other.

She heard him step back and imagined him admiring his handiwork, those ice-chip eyes unapologetically taking in every bit of her exposed flesh. The wetness pooling between her legs was cold and warm simultaneously, and she clenched involuntarily when she heard his zipper pull down. The bed depressed behind her and she tugged on her bonds reflexively, to no avail. He’d been thorough.

“Turn around, and I’ll blindfold you.” His voice had dropped nearly a full octave, the trill of his R’s burring ever thicker. The rumble of his voice shot straight to her core and though the greater part of her was nervous about all of this, this letting go and being unable to move or anticipate beyond what she could feel, another part of her—apparently the part of her connected to the soft mound between her legs—was excited beyond belief. She felt the bed depress behind her, then a palm on her arse, kneading and squeezing and roaming and a thumb brushing closer and closer to where she wanted it and the best part was imagining his other hand, long fingers wrapped around himself in the very way she denied him on the regular. She could feel the knuckles of the hand stroking his cock brush against the inside of her thigh, felt the thumb exploring the patch directly above that still with his breathing when she widened her legs and let her full weight rest on the bonds holding up her arms. And suddenly he was pressed against the back of her and she nearly yelped because she expected him to sheath then and there, but he only leaned forward so that one of his hands could reach her throat and brought the other down and around her stomach to roll a tender nipple between his fingers. “Fuck,” Clara gasped and bucked against him, seeking friction and not finding enough, clenching spasmodically.

“Not yet,” he said, and she could practically hear the smug smile through the laboring of his breathing. The fingers on her throat tightened and that— _that_ was a new sensation. She knew now why the Doctor liked it, double respiratory bypass or no. He held his fingers there for a long moment, until Clara’s attempts at swallowing increased in frequency. When he let go, Clara tried for a gulp of air just as he slammed into her, sheathed to the hilt. Her cry tore from her throat before she could think to suppress it—which was probably the point—and her breath showed no signs of returning as he began moving in short, hard thrusts. Honestly, Clara couldn’t care less that tiny whimpers were escaping her with every push, or give much thought to the ferocity with which she was pulling on her bonds. There was her mewling, and his ragged breathing, and the hand on her throat had moved to the other nipple and it felt like too many hands because one was rubbing her clit and time fell away until—“I can’t hold it!” It was the only coherent thought she’d managed since he’d knelt behind her and she felt his hand return to her throat and he was speeding up, angling up to hit her sweet spot every time, and then—it would seem to her later like one of those nuclear explosions on the telly. The ones where they muted the sound and maybe all there was to hear was a kind of whoosh while something catastrophic was happening. Whatever the case, spots bloomed in her vision until they formed a solid wall of white-dark and she was completely and utterly lost and thoughtless somewhere in the electric blank that was this new space, and when she finally came back to herself it was to find the Doctor draped around her, rubbing the marks left on her wrists with his thumbs and humming a kind of tune that sounded to her like a hymn.

“How was letting go?” he murmured in her ear after several more minutes passed.

“A one-time thing, I think,” she replied breathlessly. It didn’t occur to her for a second that her response could have been construed as an insult, but she needn’t have worried. He smiled against her hair.

“I expected nothing less.”

She turned and kissed him, tender and sweet. “Thank you,” she said, and though they both knew that losing Danny still hurt and Clara would still blame herself for a while to come, the voice in her head was gone, and that was a start. It was gone, but her memories of him were not, not this time, and that was the best gift the Doctor could have given her—to know that losing control did not mean losing everyone she held dear. 


End file.
